I’m writing this blog entry on the 31st July which means we’re more than halfway through the year and in honesty, it’s pretty cuckoo bananas. It's much colder now, but it hasn't phased me as much as it once had. As things grow old, a few new things have entered my life in exchange: Cowboy Bebop (because of a childhood MLP animation), the habit of trying to turn over stones, and truly trying to take everything one day at a time.
It’s kind of daunting—when I’m forced to think about it—how little time I have before mock exams, and it’s like hey! Slow down! I have like seven things to revise all at once, some with 2-3 papers of completely different topics! But then I remember that whatever happens, happens, and I’m just going to do my best.
I try not to think about the pressure of my own expectations, or the fact that I am not the most polished student you’ll ever cross, but I have enough skills at winging things and doing the best I can with what I have, so I try to not to approach my academics with the thought of “I need to be perfect!” because then that's an empty purpose—and I’ll quickly burnout. Even then, more often than not, I’ll step back and see a gaping, absolutely hair-raising, existential void whenever I voyeur over my own aching, sleep deprived, bloated, cramped, and sedentary body and look at the workload hounding on my back. Because, Jesus, I’m dropping a good portion of these subjects by next year (biology, chemistry, algebra, and history—I’m still picking a fight with geography right now for my subject selection), so what’s the point?
Of course, I want the satisfaction of relishing in the fruits of my labour because of how high I’ve chalked my personal expectations, but the point remains brighter than ever. And yet, I want to do my best simply because it feels good, and because I want to. I’d rather do my best, and retain the mindset that I don’t have to be insanely smart or anything because that’s just boring; I want time to prioritise myself, my hobbies, and whatever. At least I’ll be able to grant myself that satisfaction in the future, because learning to trust myself and not pay it much mind is a tricky but necessary lesson to learn.
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| A very awesome photo I took early June, or something? |
Now that Cowboy Bebop has entered my life because of MLP, “old people music” has also entered my life once again and making a comeback from year 8 because that anime reminds me too much of The Beatles, and other existential song there is from the 60s-80s.
More specifically, I find myself having Mr Tambourine Man (Live at the Newport Folk Festival. 1964) by Bob Dylan on YouTube on repeat because when I listen to it, it makes me think that everything is going to be okay. The following verse (being so impactful for little me that I stuck it to my wall with other handwritten pages of other lyrics that I found profound) listed is perhaps the one that has stuck to my side the most in the past years:
“And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind / Down the foggy ruins of time / Far past the frozen leaves / The haunted frightened trees / Out to the windy beach / Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow / Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky / With one hand waving free / Silhouetted by the sea / Circled by the circus sands / With all memory and fate / Driven deep beneath the waves / Let me forget about today until tomorrow”
There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense to me even to this day, but I won’t be surprised if I do some sort of 10 page analysis with my personal anecdotes and poetic musings embedded into it, because Bob Dylan is the reason why I believed I was an ISFP when I’m the most Ti-dominant loser you’ve ever witnessed and he’s perhaps a cornerstone to the development of my writing. Questions like, why a tambourine? Why are you asking a percussionist to play a song for you? The lyrics sound beautiful and far away but what the hell does it all mean? And it’s these questions that make it all the more better, because regardless of its seeming disjointed narrative, after all these years of attaching this song to the side of my waist and letting it rest in the in-betweens of my ribs, this song is a narrative about longing, looking to the past, youth, sorrow, and all the fun stuff I think about when I’m away from school, and the sky is wide, and the world is ahead of me and I’m not demarcated by schedules, by 5 class periods, by my grades, by what my teachers think about me, by how many extracurriculars are marked in my report. It’s a song that—to its very core—transports me without even physically hopping in a getaway vehicle and out to the countryside, where the shattered lights of the city aren't in the distance, and there’s hardly any streaks of cars or really fucking loud and arrogant motorbikes.
When I look back, it’s a song amongst the other 60s music cornerstones (Nowhere Man and In My Life by The Beatles) that has always provided comfort—especially during the liminality of navigating the parting of childhood into stupid early teenage hood in which I was trying to find my people, and most importantly, myself. Woven in the trills of the harmonica, the stomach-aching guitar, the unique sound of Dylan’s voice, there’s an aged breeze that has probably travelled across the world and has returned to me that I have not felt for a very long time to tell me: Look how far you’ve come! Which is awesome, and it’s wonderful to be reminded how I used to feel—because folded and folded and folded and folded in the bottommost fibres of my coat pockets are my old issues, pains, and realisations that although seem very, very stupid and small in the grand scheme of things, I manage to find sympathy somewhere in me for younger me because yes, these issues were small, but so was I.
Healing takes a very long time, and maybe it’s lifelong, but things are becoming a little lighter nowadays.
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